I
only recently picked up a copy of Marietta, Georgia poet Monica Fambrough’s
full-length debut, Softcover (Boston
MA: Natural History Press, 2015), a collection of short lyrics composed via
direct statements, many of which run, short-lined, down the length of the page.
The construction and directness of her poems are reminiscent of similarly-structured
and similarly-toned works by other American poets such as Emily Pettit, Bianca
Stone, Hailey Higdon, Emily Kendal Frey, Sommer Browning, Anne Cecelia Holmes,
Matthea Harvey, Natalie Lyalin, Dorothea Lasky, Amy Lawless, Anne Boyer and the
late Hillary Gravendyk. What do these poets have in common? A lyric directness with
a low tolerance for nonsense, a serious play with the sentence via line-break,
and an emotional openness and vulnerability. Much like the works of most if not
all on that list, Fambrough’s poems are fearless, even relentless, pushing and
pounding out point-of-fact statements that land well, but land hard. How do her
accumulations manage so much power? As the opening stanza of “Not Soup” reads:

If you are looking

for soup

this is not soup.

It is not warm or thick

or comforting.

It will not reheat

for lunch

or anything.

I’ve tried

and failed

to give you

what you want.

A
former publicist for Wave Books (through which I interacted with her for years,
without knowing she was also writing poems), Fambrough writes a domestic that
includes the mundane, refusing to dress it up or show it for anything other
than being a series of single steps in a long, unending line. Towards the end
of the collection, “The Anniversary” includes: “I have not / lost weight / or
improved / myself in any / significant way / The sun shines / a crease / The
cat chews / his extraordinary / crunchy food / and then with / a sudden
wrenching // The Anniversary / is upon us [.]” She shows a fearlessness in the
face of such openness, crafting carefully and with deep precision a sequence of
raw emotion. Another favourite is the poem “How I Am Liking Chicago,” the
middle of which reads: